Sonny Smiles

Pasted in the photograph album was May 1976. The heatwave began early that year. We started flinging off our jumpers and dived in to the heat and buzz, the year when everything turned golden.

That day, my brother and I coloured in our final entries for the picture competition on the back of the cereal box. We ate a lot of honey oats that week and our teeth became glued smiles. On the last occasion, he’d won a magnifying glass, although it had all got a bit too Sherlock Holmes for my liking. Of course, there wasn’t any evidence to suggest that we’d find it but he was persistent, so we searched. If only he had told the tooth fairy, we could have saved ourselves the trouble.